RS

FRONT PAGE CONTRIBUTOR

George Zimmerman: Angela Corey’s Racial Peace Offering

There are many unanswered questions in the handling of the persecution of George Zimmerman by the State of Florida but two of the salient questions are why was Angela Corey, who is noted for her intemperate personality, selected to prosecute the case and why Angela Corey dismissed an impaneled grand jury to wildly overcharge George Zimmerman with second degree murder on her own volition?

I believe if we use Ockham’s (or Occam’s) Razor the answers will become obvious: racial politics.

I think everyone can now agree on one thing, Angela Corey was possibly the worst possible choice for a high profile prosecution.

She has a sense of entitlement that is so typical of small people promoted to jobs that are well above their level of competency but who lack the self-awareness to recognize what everyone else knows. (You need look no further than her bizarre post-verdict press conference that she treated as though it was an Academy Awards acceptance rather than a repudiation to see that she occupies a different reality than most.) In Angela Corey’s world, criticism of her is a basis for legal action. She has threatened to sue Harvard if it did not fire Alan freakin Dershowitz after he pointed out her lack of legal acumen and ethics. In Florida she is something of a legend for threatening her critics.

Her lack of concern for the rule of law was almost immediately apparent. Shortly after she received the case she gave a press conference in which she disclosed that she was not seeking justice, but “justice for Trayvon”:

Corey: The first thing my team and I did upon being appointed was to meet with Trayvon’s family and pray with them. “We opened our meeting with prayer.” Also, Ms. Corey thanked “all those people across this country who have sent positive energy and prayers our way,” and she asked them to continue to pray for Trayvon’s family and for her team. “Remember, it is Trayvon’s family that are our constitutional victims….”

In short, the press conference seemed calculated to declare Zimmerman guilty before an investigation was completed or a trial conducted, conduct, which the article notes, runs counter to Florida law and American Bar Association professional standards.

During the course of the trial her office operated as expected: unencumbered or restrained by any sense of justice or fair play and without respect for the rule of law. Evidence was suppressed. White jurors were pre-emptively struck until the judge forced a halt. Her office leaked false information with the apparent intent of poisoning the jury pool. During the course of the trial her staff virtually encouraged the jury to vote their sympathies instead of using the evidence. The avalanche of buffoonery was capped off by an eleventh hour attempt to convict Zimmerman of murder by way of child abuse, a charge conjured out of thin air, and something so outside the bounds of conduct that even the marionette who acted as judge could not countenance it.

The genesis of this lawless behavior by Angela Corey is her political ambition which has been so endangered by her record as State’s Attorney that one is left wondering why Eric Holder’s civil rights division hasn’t set up shop in her office.

Corey has been at the center of three highly visible and controversial cases. The first was that of Ronald Thompson, a 65 year old Army veteran, who Corey had sentenced to 20 years in prison for firing shots into the ground to scare off teenagers trying to gain entry to a friend’s home. The full story is here and if you are wondering why no one cared look at Thompson’s picture. Elderly white guys don’t get Al Sharpton making noise on their behalf.

The next two have gotten outside attention for Corey.

In 2011, she prosecuted a 12 year old boy, Cristian Fernandez, as an adult with every intention of sending him away for life. In a move eerily similar to Corey having George Zimmerman’s wife, Shellie, indicted for perjury, Corey has also prosecuted Fernandez’s mother. This case got the attention of those defenders of the Philadelphia polling places, the New Black Panther Party.

The next year, Corey’s office charged a 31-year old black woman, Marissa Alexander, with attempted murder when she fired a weapon, during an altercation with her ex-husband who was under a restraining order. Alexander is serving a 20-year sentence. The Florida NAACP was not amused.

It is a known fact that Corey transfers more juveniles into the adult criminal system than any other county in Florida on average, but what most people don’t know if that Corey also moves a much greater percentage of black males into the adult system than the rest of Florida as a whole.

And this is odd. Because the 4th judicial circuit is made up of a majority of white people. Why is there such a huge disparity when it comes to the number of black males tried as adults? Why is this disparity continuing unquestioned?

More importantly, why would a State Attorney with this kind of record toward young black males be chosen to head the prosecution for a murder victim who is the exact demographic of those she marginalizes in her own judicial circuit? Is it a publicity stunt to save her career? An easy way to make her look like a good prosecutor in light of all statistical data over the course of three plus years showing what she is really doing to children and minorities?

Is anyone going to take a closer look into what this woman is doing?

Statistical Comparisons

Here are the percentages of black males versus white males transferred into the adult criminal system in Florida as a whole. This includes all judicial circuits, including the 4th judicial circuit:

2006-2007 – 146,950 total juvenile referrals. 4,622 transferred to adult court. Of the above percentages given in relation to those transferred to adult court, 53.3% were black. 24.5% were white.

2007-2008 – 145,539 total juvenile referrals. 4, 907 transferred to adult court. Of the above percentages given in relation to those transferred to adult court, 50.1% were black. 25.7% were white.

2008-2009 – 138,218 total juvenile referrals. 4,393 transferred to adult court. Of the above percentages given in relation to those transferred to adult court, 52.8% were black. 23.4% were white.

2009-2010 – 121,642 total juvenile referrals. 3,694 transferred to adult court. Of the above percentages given in relation to those transferred to adult court, 52.1% were black. 24.2% were white.

2010-2011 – 109,813 total juvenile referrals. 3,061 transferred to adult court. Of the above percentages given in relation to those transferred to adult court, 50.8% were black. 26.1% were white.

Here is the data for Angela Corey’s 4th judicial circuit. Note the considerable increase. Angela Corey took office in the beginning of 2009 and did nothing to decrease the number of black males tried as adults – a trend that started before her and has not ceased. The trend has likely increased for 2011-2012 since juvenile crime referrals in her district of Duval went up, while referrals in the majority of other Florida counties actually went down:

2006-2007 – 8125 total juvenile referrals. Of the above percentages given in relation to those transferred to adult court, 61.7% were black. 31.3% were white.

2007-2008 – 9482 total juvenile referrals. Of the above percentages given in relation to those transferred to adult court, 79.2% were black. 13.8% were white.

2008-2009 – 8911 total juvenile referrals. Of the above percentages given in relation to those transferred to adult court, 71.1% were black. 19.6% were white.

2009-2010 – 6877 total juvenile referrals. Of the above percentages given in relation to those transferred to adult court, 74.4% were black. 16.8% were white.

2010-2011 – 5889 total juvenile referrals. Of the above percentages given in relation to those transferred to adult court, 62.2% were black. 27.8% were white.

The easiest answer for the questions I posed earlier is that Angela Corey was feeling the heat because of the extreme nature of the charges and sentences in the Fernandez and Alexander case. Once her office was looked at because of the national attention of these two cases, it became obvious that she was trying black juveniles as adults at a rate that was 20 percentage points higher than the state average even though her area is majority white. This is not a good thing for a southern prosecutor to do. Especially not one with the megalomania Corey has exhibited.

The Zimmerman case appeared as manna from heaven. Corey probably campaigned to get the assignment though I won’t rule out that both Governor Scott and Attorney General Bondi simply showed epic bad judgment to go with their gutlessness. Then Corey went on to use Zimmerman as a means to repair her own image.

The image repair operation explains both her press conference where she boasted of having held a prayer breakfast with the Martin family and her decision to dismiss a grand jury and charge Zimmerman with a crime that was inconsistent with the evidence but in line with what the race pimp community wanted to see. This also explains why her office constantly called Trayvon Martin a “child” and why the child abuse charged was pulled out of Corey’s fourth point of contact at the last minute and why Corey and her minions have fanned out this week disparaging the jury verdict in a variety of media.

Shortly after handing her butt handed to her by a jury on Saturday, the special prosecutor in the Zimmerman trial, Angela Corey, offered up this howler

“This case has never been about race…”

Of course the case was about race. It was brought about because of race. And Corey took the case because of race.